[Starlink] 1986DA analyzed

[Dave Taht]

A huge factor in my interest in starlink - in trying to improve their
internet service - is to  help get humanity into the solar system. I'm
not a huge fan of "mars direct" and have always
felt,  a little detour, to pick up some needed materials from
off-planet, was desirable.

The upcoming psyche mission (to be flown on a falcon heavy) is pretty
exciting, see here:

https://psyche.asu.edu/mission/instruments-science-investigations/

BUT, solar electric propulsion doesn't work all that well that far in
the belt, that mission's duration is 6+ years just to get anywhere,
and I'd always felt that trying to find suitable asteroids in more
reachable orbits, particularly for "deep impact" style missions,
would reduce the cycle time from launch to data.

This paper crossed my desk this morning, discussing two NEAs (near
earth asteroids) that look to be very similar to
psyche in their metallic composition:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac235f/pdf

The money quote (literally): "the annual value, if mined, over 50
years, was 233 billion dollars/yr".

Oddly enough, they didn't mention what the delta-v required to get to
either, was, so I looked that
up via lance benners tool, which appears to be down at the moment, or
has moved, this is via
archive.org, which lists candidates with as low as half the delta-v
required to reach the moon or mars.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210202035814/https://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/~lance/delta_v/delta_v.rendezvous.html

                                                DELTA-V (ASTEROID)/
                                           PROVISIONAL  DELTA-V    DELTA-V FOR
RANK  PERCENTILE ASTEROID NAME             DESIGNATION  (KM/S)    THE
MOON MARS   H (mag) a (AU)   e     i (deg)

9545   45.79       (6178)                   1986 DA      7.197
1.200   1.142    15.1   2.823  0.582    4.3  RADAR


2016 ED85 wasn't listed, and the delta-v required of 7.197 is sadly a
bit more than the 6.3 of mars...  usually an impact mission
is much less but I can't seem to find the right url for that.

...

It is terribly ambitious for me to not only strongly suggest that
starlink put vastly better queue management into their three main
routing systems in their next release, so to provide low latency for
all packets, not just ping, but to then also suggest they look
strongly into the possibilities of asteroid mining[1] to get them on
their way to mars... but it's a lovely sunday morning, and a good day
to dream.

I return now to fixing up my broken down motor in my boat, and
prepping to log out, and sail away.

[1] https://the-edge.blogspot.com/2012/04/for-nearly-9-years-ive-had-one-of-my.html


-- 
Fixing Starlink's Latencies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9gLo6Xrwgw

Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC